The unproductive and destructive legislative session that ended chaotically Saturday showed that Gov. Cuomo has lost his mojo during his third year in office, leaving little doubt that the Legislature’s hidebound “leaders” — including Sheldon Silver — know it, Capitol insiders agree.

Cuomo, whose first two years on the job produced a new, fiscally sound and politically skillful direction for the state, tacked sharply to the left beginning in January, and the mess that followed during the next six months — tax hikes, budget gimmicks, scandalous vote-buying rebates, union giveaways, the most divisive gun-control law in state history and an ugly casino-gambling deal — was the price he paid.

And the public gets it. Polls show growing disenchantment with Cuomo.

There was another big and deeply disappointing difference between the Cuomo of 2011-12 and the Cuomo of this year.

The earlier Cuomo prided himself on bluntly describing and addressing some of the state’s most pressing problems — its anti-business climate, crushing local property taxes, unaffordable public pensions — after a long string of governors, including his father, Mario Cuomo, either ignored them or made them worse.

But this year’s Cuomo, in a striking change that saddened some close political allies, ignored those still-unresolved problems and substituted instead a series of made-up marginal issues as a device to deflect attention from the real ones.

Exhibit A was Cuomo’s 10-point Women’s Equality Act (WEA), which dominated much of the legislative session. If the WEA was so important, many of insiders asked, why didn’t he propose it in when he first took office in 2011 or in 2012? The fact is that all of the WEA’s major provisions — including abortion rights and no discrimination in hiring — already exist in New York law.

“The WEA was designed to fill the vacuum of the governor’s lack of issues this year,’’ said a Cuomo administration source. “The governor saw how effectively President Obama and the Democrats used women’s issues in the campaign last fall, and he wanted to do the same.’’

It was the same situation with Cuomo’s anti-gun Safe Act, which, in an unprecedented set of actions, has been condemned by more than 50 upstate counties and most of the state’s elected sheriffs.

Cuomo literally screamed, “You don’t need 10 bullets to kill a deer’’ in his State of the State Address to justify the Safe Act’s ban on semiautomatic rifles, an act of surprising demagoguery since state law already prohibited using that many bullets in a hunting rifle.

The Safe Act almost immediately turned a majority of upstate voters sharply against Cuomo, and he sought to undo the damage with two big proposals he promised would revitalize the upstate economy: casino gambling and “tax free New York,’’ a supposed economic-development incentive plan.

But neither of the final versions of the measures passed last week did what Cuomo promised. The gambling plan, instead of helping upstate, handed Senate GOP leader Dean Skelos and his Long Island Republicans two huge slot-machine centers.

And the final version of the “tax free’’ plan that would supposedly draw businesses upstate granted tax-free areas to all five New York City boroughs — to the benefit of Assembly Speaker Silver (D-Manhattan) and Cuomo’s core Democratic constituency.

“Gov. Cuomo this year went from being a great hope for the state to being just another in a long string of politicians who ignore the serious issues and just use their office to advance themselves politically with the hopes of reaching the White House,’’ said a longtime Albany political operative.